Let’s talk about the evolution of Facebook for a second.

Around six months ago it seemed that the new trend among the “in” crowd was quitting facebook to rebel against their questionable privacy policy and concerns that the leading social network sold out to advertisers.

That fad seems to have faded but in it’s place have come well thought out arguments against the business model that facebook has adopted and what it’s long term effects are on relationships and communication.

Concerns about facebook addiction, increasing narcissism among users, and scary cases of cyber bullying are only a few of the side-affects of the new facebook world we live in.

These concerns don’t come from 18-25 year olds who hate their parents but instead from some pretty smart folks.  Take a look and see what you think:

“Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.”

- Lev Grossman’s profile on Mark Zuckerberg for Time.

“The object of the game, for any one of these ultimately temporary social networks, is to create the illusion that it is different, permanent, invincible and too big to fail. And to be sure, Facebook has gone about as far as any of them has at creating that illusion.

If you were there for Compuserve, AOL, Tripod, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn, you might have believed the same thing about any one of those social networks…”

- “Facebook hype will fade” by Douglas Rushkoff, Special to CNN

Deep thoughts for your Friday afternoon.  Especially considering all the questions about private information and protecting your personal online brand.

“I give you private information on corporations for free, and I’m a villain…Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he’s Man of the Year.”